Improvable Tripe

Just for a bit of fun, I've slapped together a little AJAXy mashup of British pubs on Google Maps using data from Beer in the Evening. Go and have a poke at pubmap.cabal.org.uk and see what you think.

More lucky-dip items:

• Two 120GB 3.5" PATA Fujitsu (claimed by secretlondon)
  
• 120GB 3.5" PATA Maxtor
• 20GB 3.5" PATA IBM Deathstar Deskstar.
  
• Three 1GB 3.5" narrow SCSI, various.
• Three 9GB 3.5" SCA Seagate, in a SCA enclosure which fits in two half-height 5.25" bays and exposes HD68 and standard Molex power connectors. I'm not sure if I still have the enclosure key.
  
• Two PATA CD-ROMs, one is 1/3-height with a half-height fascia.
• "CPU Switch": a four port KVM which supports both PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and AT keyboard and serial mouse. No cables.
• DDS-1 DAT drive, narrow SCSI, fits in 5.25" bay. (And possibly another that I haven't found yet.)
  
• Some sort of full-length PCI-X RAID card, two SCSI channels, onboard battery and cache DIMM.
• Half-length DAC960 PCI RAID card, one SCSI channel. I used this until 2004 and it was quite a nice bit of kit.
• A large bag of mixed memory: about fifty mixed sticks starting at 1MB 30 pin SIMMs up to 256MB PC133 DIMMs. Most are 72 pin 4MB SIMMs, both FPM and EDO.
  

I'd quite like, say, a fiver each for the 120GB disks, and the SCA enclosure and disks has to be worth a few beer tokens too. Everything else FTAGH.

It's spring cleaning time, and that means parting with the knackered old junk fine legacy equipment that is not likely to be of use to me any time soon. All of this stuff is in Fulham, West London and you'll need to collect. Lighter items, I'm prepared to bring to a pub in central London in exchange for a pint.

The first box of tat:

• 110MB 3.5" PATA Maxtor. An exciting historical item as it's a Maxtor that still works.
• 420MB 3.5" PATA Seagate.
  
• 750MB 3.5" PATA Maxtor.
• 850MB 2.5" PATA Seagate.
  
• 2.5GB 3.5" PATA Maxtor.
• 4GB 3.5" SCA Fujutsu. A pull from a Sun box. I'm keeping the spud brackets though :)
  
• 6.1GB 3.5" PATA Maxtor.
  
• 8.5GB 3.5" PATA Fujitsu.
• 18GB 3.5" narrow SCSI disk in external enclosure.
• 18GB 3.5" wide SCSI IBM.
  
• 27.3GB 3.5" narrow SCSI Quantum. Pull from an old-school Mac, so probably works with the funky firmware on old Macs.
• a BJ10ex portable inkjet printer. Will need a new ink cartridge (about £10.)
• a cute ikkle fanless 486/50 box with 8MB of RAM, 2GB disk and two NICs. (Guess what I used to use this for?)

(Edit: SCSI stuff claimed-ish, by the man with some black goats and a silver knife in the pale moonlight.)

Everything is free to a good home and in working condition unless stated otherwise.

I wanted a really quick and dirty hack to auto-post to LiveJournal from a RSS feed. After the cut is the vile thing. Plug in your RSS feed URL and LJ account details and shove it in your crontab.

Note that it is really quick and dirty, most definitely not an example of good Perl code, and I suggest you create a scratch LJ account to test it against first.

High Performance Web Sites is a book about tuning web sites to make them load faster. It presents fourteen rules to follow to make a web site load faster and is essentially a dead-tree version of the “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” page on the Yahoo! Developer Network. But now you've read the web site, do you need the book?

Bookmooch was a fine tip-off. The premise is simple: earn points by posting people books, and spend those points on receiving books. It works too!

So far I've cleared a half-dozen of the more unreadable tomes off my shelf because some more brave souls reckon they can penetrate the turgid prose. It costs £1.52 to post one or two typical paperback books second class, so £7.60 later the damn things were finally out of my life.

Now, obviously I could have just thrown the books away, but instead I've earned points that can be exchanged for books. A quick cut and paste of my Amazon recommendations into my Bookmooch wishlist, and two books pop out. So a quick click-click and they're in the post at no cost to me. Rather surprisingly, given the post around here, they arrive too.

So that's £7.60 spent to get a couple of books that normally cost about £8 each, and the option to claim four more that might take my fancy. Result!

This is basically to bump the previous entry to the top of the uknot planet wossname.

There will be a meet-up at the Wenlock beer festival. Tomorrow is an unofficial warm-up which starts at 7pm, and the real event will occur on Saturday at 2pm.

This is just an advance warning that there is some fine drinking going on over at the Wenlock Arms at the end of this month. The Wenlock is reviewed here on Improvable Tripe, the Randomness Guide to London, and RBW's Beerdiary. Summary: it's a good'un.

The beer festival seems to have escaped review, but if the 2006 one was any guide, it's rather fine. It's also awfully popular, oddly enough, so if you want a seat, arrive early.

It is extremely likely that ASRBrum and ASRLon will be holding a piss-up during the festival and thus for these purposes, Hoxton will be declared to be a suburb of Birmingham. To that end, I propose a joint ASR* meet-up to occur at the usual 2pm on Saturday 27th October. Be there, or stay sober. I have a small amount of crash space available.

Also, given that beer festivals start running a bit dry on the Saturday afternoon, I also propose a quick warm-up around 7pm on the Friday beforehand for those who happen to already work in the area and need a few pints of oblivion to forget their soul-crushing jobs.

Anybody who has worked in an office for more than a femtosecond or two will notice a certain pen-related phenomenon. Go on, have a look for your pen now. It's the grubby blue Bic that is… well, “chewed” would be a bit of an understatement.